Better Know A Barcelona Startup: Gestoos (@Gestoos)

If you’ve seen the film Minority Report, then like the rest of us, I’m sure you’ve been waiting for the day when all of the technology becomes widely available to geek out on, except from pre-crime that is. Some of that technology has already made it to market (although not all is commercially available) such as personalized advertising, jet packs, insect robots, retina scanners, multi touch interfaces and now thanks to Gestoos, the ability to control our technology by simple gestures is coming into play.

Co-founder Adolfo López describes Gestoos as “software that allows you to control your applications by using simple gestures”. Having had enough of jabbing away at their keyboards, the Gestoos team set out on a mission to control their numerous devices by using physical gestures, “We wanted to find a silent and intuitive way to tell our computer “Shut Up!” explains Adolfo.

During FestUP, I had the opportunity to see the Gestoos founders demo the product and I have to say it was pretty damn cool, allowing you to interact with your device through specific programmed gestures by using a simple depth sensor kinetic camera. Co-founder Xavier, led the audience through the presentation while completing a series of simple gestures (see below) to tell his device to pause, fast forward, rewind and control the volume. “Forget about a remote when watching a movie or presenting slides, all you need are your hands” says Xavier. All one has to do to get rolling is plug in a depth sensor camera (you can buy for about €150 if you don’t already have one), select which application you want to control and then define a gesture for it. Given that depth sensing cameras are very likely to be integrated into the devices we use, the potential for a product such as this is huge. As you can see below, the gestures are very simple and intuitive, and from what I’ve seen, the software responded rapidly without any glitches or having to repeat the gesture a thousand times making you looks like a crazy person.

The Gestoos founding team consists of uber-talented Marcel Alcoverro, Adolfo López and Xavier Suau who all hold PhD’s in areas such as Computer Vision and Human activity understanding and who’s breakfast dialogue consists of machine learning and visual tracking. Let’s just say they are some pretty smart guys. Also part of the team are Germán León and Andrea Halfpap from Exipple who are taking care of the UX.

So if you you’ve had enough of getting your dirty cooking fingers all over your keyboard (and you want to look all cool like Tom Cruise in Minority Report) then get Gestoos in your life for free here.

About Stewart Masters

Stewart Masters is a Co-founder and Contributing Editor at Barcinno where he writes about the local ecosystem and his experience as an entrepreneur. He is also the co-founder @Clubkviar, a leading online reservations service for top restaurants in Europe. You can follow him here @Stewartdmasters or +StewartMasters